New and Collected Poems

CLIVE WILMER

New and Collected Poems

To Patricia

What thou lovest well remains,

the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

EZRA POUND

When we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, ‘See! this our fathers did for us.’

JOHN RUSKIN

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

from

THE DWELLING-PLACE

(1977)

I

The Exile

Chiaroscuro

The Invalid Storyteller

The Sparking of the Forge

East Anglian Churchyard

Genealogy: The Portrait

Victorian Gothic

The Ruined Abbey

The Long Climb

The Well

II

The Dedication

The Rector

Arthur Dead

In Malignant Times

Likeness

The Goldsmith

Sanctuary

The Disenchanted

Bird Watcher

Saxon Buckle

from

DEVOTIONS

(1982)

I

The Advent Carols

Narcissus, Echo

My Great Aunt, Nearing Death

On the Demolition of the ‘Kite’ District

Il Palazzo della Ragione

Pony and Boy

Two Cambridge Images

Beyond Recall

II from Air and Earth

Migrant

Beside the Autobahn

Aerial Songs

On the Devil’s Dyke

III

The Natural History of the Rook

Near Walsingham

Home

Homecoming

For the Fly-Leaf of a King James Bible

Antiphonal Sonnets

Gothic Polyphony

To Nicholas Hawksmoor

Venice

A Woodland Scene

The Parable of the Sower

The Peaceable Kingdom

Chinoiserie: The Porcelain Garden

Prayer for my Children

OF EARTHLY PARADISE

(1992)

I

Invocation

Three Brueghel Paintings

St Francis Preaching to the Birds

The San Damiano Crucifix

The Coat of Many Colours

Cattle Market

Birdsong and Polyphony

The Infinite Variety

The Thirst

To Robert Wells

II A Catalogue of Flowers

Wild Flowers

Bindweed Song

An Autumn Vision

Post-war Childhoods

Conservancy

Alkanet

To Paint a Salt Marsh

III

Work

The Law of the House

At the Grave of Ezra Pound

At the Grave of William Morris

Fonte Branda in Siena

A Plaque

To a Poet from Eastern Europe, 1988

To Haydn and Mozart

The Kitchen Table

IV

Charon’s Bark

Two Journals

The Temple of Aphrodite

Amores

Re-reading my Poem ‘Saxon Buckle’

Transference

The Dream

In the Greenwood

The Garden

Oasis

The Earth Rising

V

Caedmon of Whitby

KING ALFRED’S BOOK & OTHER POEMS

(1992–2000)

I

King Alfred’s Book

Lindisfarne Sacked

House-martin

The River in Springtime

The Manor House

Anthem

Psalm

Grace

The Pig Man

Kaspar Hauser

II Three Epistles

To Thom Gunn, on his Sixtieth Birthday

Letter to J.A. Cuddon

In Memoriam Graham Davies, Psychotherapist (1937–1993)

III

Visitation

The Heron

Vacations

To Pyrrha

Soft and Hard Porn

Fin de Siècle

The New Era

IV

Epitaph

At a Friend’s Funeral

Fernando Pessoa’s Lisbon

Wood Work

Stone Work

A Baroque Concerto

Casa Natal de Borges

The Translator’s Apology

Olivier Messiaen

THE MYSTERY OF THINGS

(2006)

I

Bottom’s Dream

Dog Rose in June

Wonderwoman

Greensleeves

In the Library

The Ruin

Much Ado about Nothing

The Holy of Holies

Recorded Message

A Vision

The Ladder

Bethel

The Architect at his Mountain Villa

For my Daughter’s Wedding

Overnight Snow

Plenty

Chutney

The Apple Trees

At Great Coxwell

Behold, the Fowls of the Air

In the Beginning

W.S. Graham Reading

To George Herbert

The Source

The Falls

II

Ghostliness

Stigmata

I The Visit to La Verna

II A Quotation

III As it Was

IV The Conversation

V Padre Pio

VI Symmetry

VII Spiritual Biography

VIII Walled Garden

IX The Second Day

X Piero’s Resurrection (1)

XI Piero’s Resurrection (2)

XII Healer

XIII The Names of Flowers

XIV The Desert

The Need for Angels

REPORT FROM NOWHERE & OTHER POEMS

(2006–2011)

I

To One who Accused him of Writing Hate-mail

Meditation

To a Buddhist

The Nice and the Nasty

The Language of Flowers

Message

To his Muse

II

Learning to Read

In the Conservatory

A Blue Tit’s Egg

Gregoire, 60

Cinnabar Moth

A Curse

Gaudier-Brzeska in the Trenches

A Farmhouse near Modena, c.1980

III

Remembering John Heath-Stubbs

Shakespeare

Brook’s Lear

In Hospital

Fragment

A Far-off Country

Civitas

Report from Nowhere

POEMS WRITTEN FOR SIDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

(2009–10)

A Valedictory Ode

The Sidney Carol

SELECTED POEMS FROM THE HUNGARIAN

Jenő Dsida

Maundy Thursday

Miklós Radnóti

Garden on Istenhegy

In the Margins of the Prophet Habbakkuk

First Eclogue

Written in a Copy of Steep Path

Foaming Sky

Autumn Begins Restlessly

Night

Paris

O Ancient Prisons

Eighth Eclogue

Forced March

Postcards

István Vas

Romanus Sum

János Pilinszky

Harbach 1944

The French Prisoner

The Passion at Ravensbrück

Introitus

Van Gogh’s Prayer

György Gömöri

Fake Semblances of Odysseus

Letter from a Declining Empire

Domokos Szilágyi

Job

György Petri

You are knackered, my Catullus

Stairs

Now Only

Gratitude

To Be Said Over and Over Again

Electra

To Imre Nagy

Daydreams

A Recognition

What a Shame

A Smile

Without

Anna T. Szabó

The Labour Ward

She Leaves me

OTHER TRANSLATIONS

Catullus

‘Odi et amo’

St Francis of Assisi

Canticle of the Sun

Dante

Sestina

Dante to Love’s Faithful

Guido Cavalcanti

Cavalcanti’s Reply

Rainer Maria Rilke

Archaic Torso of Apollo

‘Say, poet, what it is you do’

Fernando Pessoa

‘I leave to the blind and deaf’

‘There was a rhythm in my sleep’

from The Keeper of Flocks (by ‘Alberto Caeiro’)

‘You who, believing in your Christs and Marys’ (by ‘Ricardo Reis’)

Czesław Miłosz

From a Notebook: Bon on Lake Geneva

Lyubomir Nikolov

A Wasp

Hornets

Scaling Carp

St George’s Day

Osip Mandelstam

Hagia Sophia

Notes

Index of Titles and First Lines

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Carcanet Press, I am happy to say, has been publishing my work for thirty-five years. This book brings together most of the four collections they have issued, and two new ones. The first of the new ones, King Alfred’s Book & Other Poems, comprises the eleven ‘New Poems’ from my Carcanet Selected Poems (1995) and seventeen poems from The Falls, which was published by the Worple Press in 2000. The second, Report from Nowhere & Other Poems, consists of twenty-three previously unpublished poems written over the last five years. I have also revived eight poems omitted from earlier volumes: ‘The Long Climb’, the ‘Two Cambridge Images’, ‘A Plaque’, ‘The River in Springtime’, ‘The Translator’s Apology’, ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘The Source’. I have inserted these where they might have appeared in the books from which I originally excluded them. A few poems cropped up in more than one of my collections – ‘Wild Flowers’, ‘Bindweed Song’, ‘An Autumn Vision’, ‘Visitation’, ‘The Holy of Holies, ‘A Vision’, ‘W.S. Graham Reading’, ‘The Falls’ – so had to be fixed in one collection here. I have made a few revisions, but all of them are minor adjustments; I have made no substantial changes. I have also corrected some mysterious typographical errors that disfigured my Selected Poems.

In addition to my own poems I have included a large selection from my work as a translator. The thirty-six translations from Hungarian were all produced in collaboration with George Gömöri, with whom I have been working for nearly forty years and to whom I owe an enormous debt. Our versions from Miklós Radnóti were first published as Forced March (Carcanet, 1979). A new edition, revised and expanded, was published by the Enitharmon Press in 2003; all the Radnóti poems reprinted here are from that edition. Most of the poems by György Petri are taken from Eternal Monday: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), those by George (or György) Gömöri himself from Polishing October: New and Selected Poems (Shoestring Press, 2008) and those by János Pilinszky from Passio: Fourteen Poems (Worple Press, 2011). The poems by Anna T. Szabó were published in the Hungarian Quarterly, as were three uncollected poems by Petri; those by Jenő Dsida, István Vas and Domokos Szilágyi were anthologised in The Colonnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian Poetry, edited by George Gömöri and George Szirtes (Bloodaxe Books, 1996).

The book includes a few commissioned pieces. The two poems written for Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where I am a Fellow in English, have both been set to music: the ‘Valedictory Ode’ for Dame Sandra Dawson by James Freeman and ‘The Sidney Carol’ by Christopher Page. Both were sung in Chapel by the College choir and have since been published in the Sidney Sussex College Annual. ‘Caedmon of Whitby’ was written as the libretto for John Hopkins’s Cantata, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 in 1993. ‘Epitaph’ has been carved on the gravestone of my late friend Michael Bulkley in Histon Road Cemetery, Cambridge. ‘Bottom’s Dream’ was commissioned for Around the Globe, the magazine of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. ‘Civitas’ was commissioned by Magdalene College, Cambridge, for its Festival of Landscape in 2009 and published in the festival anthology: Contourlines: New Responses to Landscape in Word and Image, edited by Neil Wenborn and M.E.J. Hughes (Salt Publishing, 2009).

Many items in this Collected Poems now appear in a book for the first time. Most of them were first published in the following magazines, to whose editors my thanks are due: Agenda, Around the Globe, Hungarian Quarterly, Modern Poetry in Translation, Notre Dame Review, PN Review, Poetry, Port, The London Magazine, Times Literary Supplement.

Clive Wilmer

from

THE DWELLING-PLACE

(1977)

IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER

A man’s religion is the form of mental rest, or dwelling-place, which, partly, his fathers have gained or built for him, and partly, by due reverence to former custom, he has built for himself; consisting of whatever imperfect knowledge may have been granted, up to that time, in the land of his birth, of the Divine character, presence, and dealings; modified by the circumstances of surrounding life.

JOHN RUSKIN

, Val d’Arno

I

The Exile

I threw up watchtowers taller than my need

With bare walls the enemy could not scale,

I wrenched stone from the near countryside

And built my city on the highest hill;

     Over the land I scarred I reared

Impenetrable the walls and citadel.

Then to approach the city from afar

All you could see was soaring, there was such peace

Knowing the city mine I lay secure.

My own, one night, woke me – every face

    A jutting rock relief in glare,

The torchlight that illumined new distress.

They lit me into darkness. The harsh sun –

My understanding dazzled when it dawned –

Disclosed me vulnerable. I stumbled on,

Till blown, a sterile seed, by years like wind

    Indifferent guidance, I am set down

Among familiar stone in a changed land.

Now it is only details I perceive:

The towers lopped, stone interspersed with weed

In patches; a deeper speckling seems to give

Form to the complex of decay, but is fled

    With a lizard flicker. Poppies revive,

In the wall they spatter, spectres of old blood.

Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro: abandoned dark

Falling back before the advancing light.

If the room I live in were not so vast

The light I hold would cancel the black

Out there, that dissipates my range of sight.

To banish darkness, first you must plumb

The darkness’ depth – and nothing known more deep.

I know true darkness is much more

Than interrupted light – shadow clung

To the thing’s edge – or the domain of sleep.

I have known times when the mind cracks before

The force of its own thoughts. With those

Moments in mind he has taken a lamp

To cast a light on the future’s flickering floor;

Behind his back, the gates of darkness close.

Behind his back, the gates of darkness close;

The leap he takes is into light’s abyss,

Knowing that at the brink one never knows

Whether it’s darkness that encloses

Light, or the light darkness.

He takes a chance on what may lie in store

For him in landscapes where the objects glow:

In my world where the darkness breeds around me,

Light may open up a world beyond me.

Opening outward, opening more and more.

The Invalid Storyteller

Lace, we remember, faded lace

To filter light and veil the panes

    Against the external day.

The light was intermeshed with lace

Upon the wall, fastidious,

In patterns subtle as decay

     And intricate as pain:

Like pinks and greens on carcasses,

Like wrinkles on an old man’s face.

Beyond our reach, above the veil

Where knowledge knit with pain and death

     Shimmered, the sun’s rays

Burst through the panes and cast a pale

Rectangular frieze upon the wall,

Whose colours told of summer days,

     Whose pallor told of death;

Where he could watch what he recalled

Advancing, as he told each tale.

The Sparking of the Forge

Stiffened and shrunk by age my grandfather

Leans forward now, confined within his chair,

Straining to raise a finger to point back

Over his shoulder, scarcely able to look

Over his shoulder through the darkening window

At the road behind him and before me where

The mailcoach ran just seventy years ago –

He suddenly tells me, reaching to capture one

Glimpse of the road where memory finds its form

And in whose lamps so many memories burn:

The armed guard in the rear, behind bars –

Changing the horses at the road’s end inn –

And where we buy his tobacco every day

Was once the blacksmith’s forge. I watch him stare

Into the crumbling coal and feel the blaze

Flare in the ancient forge and his childhood-eyes;

And whether the shoes were hammered on red-hot

Uncertain now, he recollects their glare.

His words uncertain now I watch him see

Bright in his mind the sparking of the forge,

The monstrous anvil and the sizzling steel,

The raising of the hammer high to feel

What once he had of muscle in his arm,

The hammer’s beat sounding his deepest urge.

Each time recalled another fragment lost,

Still his past seeps back – with broken breath –

Continuous in a stream of memories.

I pick up only broken images:

Confined by time, as he is by his age,

My own time’s loss I find in his lost youth.

An old man’s death